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Open Government at the FCC

Privacy & Transparency

Flagship Initiative: Measuring Broadband America

Working collaboratively with industry, academia, public interest organizations and others, the FCC’s Measuring Broadband America program develops open and transparent platforms for measuring broadband performance and releasing Open Data solutions driven by the contributions of volunteers from across the country. The FCC Speed Test App for Android and iPhone extends the MBA’s four-year history measuring consumers’ fixed broadband performance to measure the mobile broadband performance of volunteers throughout the US using crowd-sourced smartphone applications. The app test volunteers upload and download speed, latency and packet loss, as well as the wireless performance characteristics of the broadband connection and the kind of handsets and versions of operating systems tested.

The program is deeply committed to protecting volunteers’ privacy and employs privacy measures developed collaboratively with Federal Trade Commission officials, academic privacy experts and others to analyze and process mobile data that could potentially identify specific smartphones.

Since 2011, the FCC has released three MBA reports on fixed broadband performance together with the datasets, technical documentation of the open technologies and architecture, sampling approaches, testing methodologies, data schemas, and database, statistical and other data processing scripts and software. The open and transparent platform used to measure mobile performance and source code for the FCC Speed Test and data is also made freely available to the public. The open data collected by MBA fixed and mobile efforts are used with ongoing open data efforts visualizing data for the public in maps and other solutions. Making FCC data and technologies available further strengthens the traditional ways the FCC serves the public and facilitates our goal of realizing an even more Open Government at the FCC.